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How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

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Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#81

Post by jrockway »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #9
saagarjha wrote: post #3

One of the corollaries to this is that if you are basing your decisions on analytics, you are probably under-representing people who block them, who often tend to be a non-representative subset of your users. I have seen multiple projects do things like stop supporting features that their analytics “showed nobody was using” but failed to realize that a significant portion of their (often technical and very vocal) use…

When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

Windows 10 telemetry is pretty scary. I used to do the Windows Insider program, but noticed that they want to collect every website you visit, which seemed a little much to me. Now every week or so Windows complains that I'm not getting insider builds anymore and asks me to reenable the telemetry. The hilarious thing is that I still am getting those builds; when my computer "blue screens" it's green and claims to be a prerelease build. Makes me wonder if they really turned off telemetry.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#82

Post by jrockway »

saagarjha wrote: post #20
lettergram wrote: post #17

This is why I have analytics on the JavaScript side and server side. I can calculate those who block my analytics and at the same time capture a lot of the relevant information

Subverting the desires of people who would like privacy is not a good look.

Sending a User-Agent header unsolicited seems like user error, not bad intent on the part of the site owner.

I do the opposite, my webserver sends back some information unsolicited about my production environment that you can track if you want.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#83

Post by Spooky23 »

jrockway wrote: post #81
thanhhaimai wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

Windows 10 telemetry is pretty scary. I used to do the Windows Insider program, but noticed that they want to collect every website you visit, which seemed a little much to me. Now every week or so Windows complains that I'm not getting insider builds anymore and asks me to reenable the telemetry. The hilarious thing is that I still am getting those builds; when my computer "blue screens" it's green and claims to be…

Office telemetry is worse. There are many cases where your data goes up to Microsoft.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#84

Post by heroprotagonist »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #9
saagarjha wrote: post #3

One of the corollaries to this is that if you are basing your decisions on analytics, you are probably under-representing people who block them, who often tend to be a non-representative subset of your users. I have seen multiple projects do things like stop supporting features that their analytics “showed nobody was using” but failed to realize that a significant portion of their (often technical and very vocal) use…

When I turned off my Windows 10 Telemetry, I expressed a clear choice that I'd rather not give my data, and it's fine for my voice to not be heard. I just really don't care about Windows 10 that much. On the other hand, I turned on all the telemetry for OctoPi, Steam, and a bunch of other softwares I care about. I want my voice to be heard for those cases. Just curious, what's so inexcusable about that?

I wish there was a simple one-button toggle to turn it off completely, but there's not.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#85

Post by furtive808 »

I run a non-tech eCommerce site in North America that does $6-8m a year and I tested two 90 day periods year over year and found 12.4% of transactions didn’t show up in Google Analytics. I haven’t segmented them by geo yet but about 75% of my sales are in North America. There was only a 0.1% difference year over year.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#86

Post by ozi »

roblabla wrote: post #72
ozi wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, exactly. "Inexcusable" seems a bit extreme. Are you suggesting companies spend 10x on manual user research? Are you willing to pay more for a product because of increased costs to understand what users actually want?

Yes, I expect them to do manual user research. And “making the users pay” is the wrong way to frame this - product pricing and labor aren’t that tightly correlated. Besides, When we bought magazines the editors didn’t know what stories people were reading or what words you were spending more time reading. When you buy a tool the manufacturer doesn’t know how you use it. Why software gets a free pass at getting all th…

> wrong way to frame this

this is the reality of how businesses operate.

> product pricing and labor aren’t that tightly correlated.

If you're the staff accountant, sure. You're technically correct.

If you're the CFO and I'm trying to convince you we need to spend $1M on user research instead of $100K, you can be sure this is taken into account when modeling monetization strategies to recoup R&D costs.

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#87

Post by saagarjha »

hinkley wrote: post #77
eli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Server side analytics are overwhelmed by bots and crawlers and other non humans in my experience

Maybe we should we whitelisting for analytics. Instead of perpetually trying to identify bots, Pick the 20% of your users who you are pretty sure are actually humans. Nielsen-style, if you will. Maybe two cohorts. The people we're really sure about, and the ones we're pretty sure about. If they diverge, ask why.

> Instead of perpetually trying to identify bots, Pick the 20% of your users who you are pretty sure are actually humans.

Note that reCAPTCHA thinks you’re a bot if you block analytics…

Re: How many users block Google analytics? (2017)

#88

Post by userbinator »

How many users who block GA are also going to not be honest about the OS or browser they claim to be? I suspect that number is going to be a much higher percentage than of those who don't block GA...

I'd imagine most users who block GA/ads on desktop would also want to on mobile, but can't just because it's so difficult to set up an adblocker on mobile.

A HOSTS file or blocking DNS server will easily do that, my whole network in fact has GA and a bunch of other crap blocked this way. On the other hand, setting up a MITM proxy/VPN is much much harder on mobile. However I am surprised at the 0% for Android and 17% for iOS blocking GA --- I was expecting it to be the opposite, with the former being historically much less of a walled-garden than the latter.

On the other hand, perhaps everyone who blocks GA and uses Android is in the aforementioned situation of not saying that they're using Android --- they may be reporting a Linux or some other user-agent.

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